Eagle Forum Legislative Alerts

Friday, May 31, 2013

In previous broadcasts, I've told you about the important decision the U.S. Supreme Court will be making next month, and how we must pray for God to enlighten any swing votes to persuade them to uphold marriage the way the Lord ordained it. But we do have to give some thought to what we will do if the Court throws out traditional marriage and opens it up to any people who want to live together. I don't like thinking about that possibility, but we probably should. For guidance, I suggest we look at Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, wherein he dealt with the worst Supreme Court decision in history, the infamous Dred Scott decision. The Supreme Court ruled wrong in that case, holding that a man who traveled to other states had to be protected in his property right of owning the slave, named Dred Scott.

Abe Lincoln was eloquent. He first of all admitted that a Supreme court decision would be binding on the parties to a case. But then he said that we should consider such an erroneous decision limited to that particular case and never let it become a precedent for other cases, with the hope that it may one day be overruled. Then he made this important pronouncement: "If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

In other words, if the Supreme court makes such an erroneous decision on such vital questions as slavery, or the definition of marriage, we will no longer be a self-governing people but a nation ruled by "that eminent tribunal." And that, we cannot allow to happen.